The Politics of Presbyterianism

Musings On How Big Is The PC(USA) Big Tent – Part 1: Herding Cats?

So I got this research idea over lunch today: I have been considering ways to quantify how big the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) tent really is and I thought that maybe Twitter accounts might be one metric. I am not sure how well this actually does what I want but it was an interesting experiment and so I thought I would share it as a musing.

The idea started when I was thinking about the articles I write as previews for various general assemblies and including the official social media links in the article. There is usually an official Twitter account for the denomination, maybe one for the GA itself, sometimes a news account, a couple of official individuals and typically a ministry agency or two. Check out the Presbyterian Church in Ireland post if you want a good example and one I consider typical.

But thinking about the PC(USA) I knew that it had a bunch more accounts so I started compiling a list. Here is the list of what I found in about an hour of searching. I was surprised at how many different official Twitter accounts the PC(USA) has. Besides the general official one (@Presbyterian) I found the following 37 (in no particular order):

These additions are not reflected in the numbers discussed below. /Update]

Please note that this does not include churches, presbyteries or synods. I did not include accounts for wrapped-up special projects like the MC Commission or the Glory to God Hymnal. It does not include any seminaries or conference centers like Stony Point or Montreat. No affinity groups like APCE or alumni groups like YAV Alumni are in the list. And no individual accounts for officers of the denomination’s entities. It does include both the old and new Presbyterian Foundation accounts as well as two inactive Presbyterian News accounts of different vintages. It also has some periodical publications like Call to Worship, Presbyterians Today and the Mission Year Book for Prayer (which appears to have gone inactive). As I was compiling the list my criteria for inclusion if I did not recognize the entity was whether it had a web page URL that began with pcusa.org or presbyterianmission.org. But to be clear, some that I know are PC(USA) entities have their own branded web URL’s like 1001 New Worshiping Communities with www.onethousandone.org. You are welcome to argue with my include/cut line but the list is massive enough that one or two inclusions or deletions won’t change my musing about it.

Big tent? You have to admit that there is certainly something for everyone in those 38 Twitter accounts – although I am a bit disappointed to see the Evangelism account has not been active for almost four years so that pulls one edge of the tent in a bit. The list can be reduced a bit by removing the six inactive accounts and the three that I see as direct sales accounts (Store, WJK Books, ThoughtfulChristian, but not Giving Catalog). That still leaves 29 active Twitter accounts that cover the wide range of areas the PC(USA) is in. And it should be remembered that some of these represent multiple accounts in the same entity, such as Theology and Worship having a Twitter account for both general items as well as one dedicated to their periodical “Call to Worship.” It is also interesting to observe that neither of the two big top divisions, the Office of the General Assembly and the Presbyterian Mission Agency, have stand-alone accounts but both tweet under the most general @Presbyterian account.

Some thoughts…

With so many sub-areas it does raise questions about the church. There is so much going on has the PC(USA) spread itself too thin, especially in light of declining membership? Do each of these areas end up as its own constituency and so the Big Tent ends up covering a multitude of separate groups with little mixing between them? With limited resources do these different areas compete for scarce resources or does their social media outreach provide the means of providing resources for their ministry?

As the title of this piece implies, when I looked at this list and from my knowledge of the activity on social media, I had to wonder if managing this large assemblage was akin to herding cats. How much does each area define its own mission, goals and objectives versus how much do they work together on a set of well-defined goals and objectives that are related to the mission of the body as a whole? Is there coordination of these accounts around common themes and events or does each sort of work its own themes out and focus on its own activities?

A quick test of this: The next churchwide event is the Big Tent event at the end of the month. I went through the 29 active Twitter feeds and looked to see how many had some reference to Big Tent since May 1. Some had numerous references, some had only one and sometimes that was a retweet. But in total I found 13 of the 29, almost half, had at least one mention of this summer’s churchwide event. I am not sure if that is good or bad but it does suggest there is not strong coordination across the entities regarding churchwide priorities.

OK, I will leave it at that for today. I saw a bunch of other points on which I could collect future data that might make interesting metrics of the big tent nature of the denomination. Maybe I will have time to chase some of those further at a later date. But for now, on to other things.

9 thoughts on “Musings On How Big Is The PC(USA) Big Tent – Part 1: Herding Cats?”

Thanks for embarking on this project – it should be illuminating. One thought I had in reading your post – not an argument, just an observation: how important is evidence of coordination in this context? Indeed, how important IS overt coordination among these entities? (cf., e.g., the Roman Catholic Church). And how reliable is Twitter as a metric of cooperation/coordination?

Thanks Brint,
Your observations a very relevant and both are something that I had considered. First, this was one of my quicker and less polished pieces and so left a number of things intentionally hanging.

Do things need to be coordinated? Not necessarily in my view. I do know that each of those areas comes under a broader program area so at some level they are administratively linked. Does the public face need to show coordination? Maybe not if each group has a mission and it working on it.

But what I am ultimately trying to look at – and I guess I am stating my previously hinted at but not formally stated thesis – is whether the PC(USA) has gotten itself spread too thin that it is not effective. As I suggested early on in the post, most Presbyterian branches (all admittedly smaller in membership) only have a couple things going in their public face. So is the PC(USA) large enough still that it can sustain this many ministry areas or is it spreading itself thin or having so many ministries that it is confusing its message. From that point of view the question is whether coordination is needed or would be helpful in presenting the denomination.

As for using Twitter, I found this exercise to be very instructive. Things I noted I could quantify in the future include how ofter that account tweets and who they retweet. Ultimately will it be a reliable source on the ministry or just on the social media administrator for the ministry will have to be seen. As you suggest it may indeed be a measure of the latter and not the former.

Thanks again for the thoughts. I am hoping my next foray in to this dataset will be a bit more polished.

Thanks for compiling this list! The Israel/Palestine Mission Network of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) is an official, GA-mandated mission network of the PC(USA) and is on Twitter! Follow us at @ipmn. We’ve also created a “Presbyterians and friends of Presbyterians” Twitter list, some of the members of which are included in your list and some are not (there are a lot of individuals and churches in our list). You can subscribe to that list here: https://twitter.com/IPMN/lists/presbys-co

Thanks Bob,
Yes I looked at IPMN a bit longer than some but ultimately, possibly incorrectly, excluded it because it was my understanding that while it is mandated by GA it is not in and of itself an entity within the Presbyterian Mission Agency. The question here is how do entities of the Mission Agency relate. I apologize if I mis-characterized it.

Yes Anita, that was a very nice exchange and I appreciated your and Brandon’s contribution. With this series of posts I am working in that direction and in an upcoming one you should see them both referenced.

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define: GA Junkie

Pronounced "gee-eh-jun-key"
GA: Abbrv. for General Assembly, the highest governing body in many presbyterian style churches
A GA Junkie is someone who closely follows the politics of PresbyterianismEarliest documented use

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In case it is not obvious, the views expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my church, presbytery, synod or denomination. Furthermore, the views expressed here usually do not reflect the views of my extended family.

I can be contacted at steve-at-gajunkie.com. You can follow me on Twitter @ga_junkie